The New Museum of Ethnography

Art Nouveau character defines the uniquely mute landmark of Budapest’s New Museum of Ethnography  

The New Museum of Ethnography at the edge of Budapest City Park intends to address the always-pressing dilemma between local culture and global trends, historic conservation, and innovation by proposing a building which is profoundly contextual in its abstraction and mysteriously strange in its urban attitude. A monumental bar-shaped building is partially fractured into four adjacent and dissenting volumes that both assert and challenge the typological determinacy of the rectangular block.

Partially reminiscent of Art Nouveau buildings around Budapest, the concrete monolithic base is crowned with a tile-cladded mansard roof. This fact allows the museum to communicate its critical mission by opposition: appearing massive, silent, and restrained in the noisiest and most urban part of the city while expressing its most emblematic features against the skyline and fitting in, hence asserting its urban visibility and status as a cultural landmark.